UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

Eurovision is a mere example of how Israel is desperately trying to gain legitimacy through a stubborn insistence on old myths and the almost comical exhaustion of the same talking points. Because Zionism is a modern colonial movement that is incompatible with universal human rights and international law, and because Israel does not have any moral or legal justification for the colonization of Palestine and for the genocidal maltreatment of Palestinians, the Israeli regime will continue to desperately necessitate absurd propaganda in its efforts to narrate to the outside world, and probably to itself, a modified version of history, trying to prove that it has some sort of legitimacy.

We do not deny that Jews have the right to live in safety, but why should the solution to a tragedy they faced produce a tragedy for another people? The establishing of this “safe haven”, the way it was done in 1948 and ever since, has resulted in mass ethnic cleansing and incremental genocide of Palestinians. The Palestinian people have faced one massacre after another over the past seven decades and as a result, they have no “safe haven” of their own.

His article last month declaring that Israel has a “moral right to annex all of the West Bank” has made him persona non grata on campus, the focus of student protests and a Faculty Council vote condemning his article for promoting “racism toward Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular.”At a campus forum Tuesday on Middle East politics and academic freedom, a dozen students walked out chanting, “Jason Hill, you can’t hide, we know you want genocide,” as shown on video by Students for Justice in Palestine at DePaul.

Any ceasefire agreement that does not lead to the immediate lifting of the blockade on the Gaza Strip and the reopening of the Rafah crossing, and all the other crossings in a manner that allows the inflow of fuel, medicine, and all other basic goods, and does not include provisions for ending what the Israeli occupation and apartheid – will not be accepted.We will no longer allow Gaza to be severed from Palestine and the historical context behind the suffering of its people. This is not a “conflict”, as the Israelis like to present it, with a hostile armed group.It is an occupation, launched by a settler-colonial power which seeks to ethnically cleanse an entire indigenous population in order to solidify and legitimise its colony. What is happening in Gaza is incremental genocide, not a “security operation”.

one member of WIFI leadership asserted the Israeli state routinely killing Palestinians in order to displace them from their land did not constitute genocide because the Palestinian population as a whole had not declined, due to a high fertility rate. This is totally inconsistent with any definition of the word “genocide”, either provided by a dictionary or defined by international law and deeply offensive to Palestinians who have suffered repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing by the Israeli government.

… If the conversations that were had in the two College Council (CC) meetings are any indication of the positions that WIFI intended to promote on campus, then we ought to celebrate their proposal being denied. Williams ought not to provide a platform to groups that, when provided with first-hand testimony from Palestinian students about the violence of the occupation, attempt to redefine terms like genocide and colonialism to suit their own ends.

The past that Netanyahu rejects is the one designed after World War II to criminalise behaviours such as the waging of aggressive war, genocide and apartheid. Some of these behaviours had for centuries threatened European Jews. Netanyahu, and those who voted for him, no longer identify with the suffering of their European ancestors. Israel is now a strong, aggressive, land-hungry power much like 19th century Russia and Germany. Many Israeli Jews are also, like Donald Trump’s core supporters, ethnic racists and supremacists.

We need to abolish the settler-colonial mindset, which is at the root of the problem, indeed, its very cause. Just as revolutionary visionaries advocate prison abolition, rather than prison reform, we need to advocate indigenous liberation, not setter-colonial “reform.” To elaborate on the comparison, “prison reform” assumes that the institution of incarcerating criminals is not essentially flawed, and can be improved upon. In the settler-colonial context, “reformers” assume that the US and Israel are not fundamentally and violently racist, they can become “multiethnic democracies.” On the other hand, prison abolitionists want a world without prisons, because incarceration itself, not just the way it is currently practiced, is wrong. They argue that incarceration is never the solution, and can only have a detrimental effect on the incarcerated and society at large. Settler-colonial abolitionists, then, would seek an abolition, rather than a “reform” of the US and Israel, whose very existence hinges on indigenous genocide, so as to respect indigenous sovereignty.

In a Tablet piece, Benjamin Gladstoneadvocated for the inclusion of Jews into intersectionality. While the author seems to understand Crenshaw’s theory, he fails to view Jews outside of Zionist frameworks. His argument that “Jewish issues do belong in the intersectional justice movement,” is of course correct. However, by equating anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, he postulates both as “serious intersectional problems,” and thus alleges anti-Jewish racism to be a feature of intersectionality. Even more, the author paints Zionism as a “liberation movement” that “has the potential to not only coexist with but also support and energize other liberation movements, from women’s liberation to Palestinian nationalism.” This attempt to romanticize a genocidal settler-colonial movement overwrites the plight of Palestinians and marginalizes Jewish opposition to Zionism.